Page 105 - The Arts of China, By Michael Sullivan Good Book

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6
The Three Kingdoms and the
Six Dynasties

During the four hundred years between the fall of the Han Dy-
nasty and the rise of the T'ang, China went through a period of
political, social, and intellectual ferment comparable to that of
modern Europe. No fewer than thirty dynasties and lesser king-
doms passed across the scene before the Sui reunited the empire in
581. At the fall of the Han Dynasty in A. D. 220, China was divided
into the Three Kingdoms of Wu, Wei, and Shu; in 280 it was once
more reunited, under a Wei general who had usurped the throne in
265 and renamed the dynasty Chin. Beyond the northern fron-
tiers, the Hsiung-nu and the Hsien-pi were watching with interest
the incessant civil wars to which the now shrunken empire was
victim. When, soon after a.d. 300, two rival princes rashly ap-
pealed to them for aid, they promptly advanced into China. In 3 1
the Hsiung-nu captured Loyang, massacred twenty thousand of
its inhabitants and took the emperor prisoner; they then moved on
to Ch'ang-an, which they put to the sack, while the Chin court
fled in panic to Nanking. The Hsiung-nu and Hsien-pi were not
the only tribes to take advantage of China's weakness in order to
invade the north; sixteen petty barbarian kingdoms were to rise
and fall before the Toba Wei, a Turkish tribe, brought the whole of
North China under their rule in 439. They established their capital
near Ta-t'ung in northern Shansi, abandoned their nomadic way
of life and adopted Chinese dress, eventually becoming so Sini-
cized that the use of the Toba language was forbidden altogether.
At the same time, they energetically defended their northern bor-
ders against other and more barbarous tribes and pushed their cav-
alry as far as Kucha in the Tarim Basin, thus reopening the trade
route into central Asia.
The invasions had split China into two countries, with two cul-
tures. While the north sank into barbarism, tens of thousands of
Chinese refugees migrated to the south. Nanking now became the
cultural and political centre of "free China," to which merchants
and Buddhist missionaries came from Southeast Asia and India.
Yet this region too was in a perpetual state of turmoil and unrest,
in which enormous quantities of art treasures were destroyed.
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